Saturday, October 29, 2016

Believe in YOU!

In 2016, I was selected to attend a 'Winning Career Strategies for high-performing managers' workshop at Deloitte. It is a series of 3 2-day sessions in 3 different cities and the first session was in Portland in October. The fall colors and the waterfront view from our office was beautiful. Most of Day 1 was focused on self-awareness and did not sound exciting to me as I always thought of myself as a reflective person with a clear head. I wasn't sure what I was going to learn about myself in one day that I did not already know, and wished they focused on other career strategies. Day 2 was about selecting a 'Board of Directors' for yourself that would guide you throughout your career, which seemed more interesting.

We were all asked to take a Myers Briggs personality test a week ago and the results would be shared on Day 1. I have taken a couple of personality tests before and I always knew the results. I am a driver, planner with a logical and analytical mindset. The results of Myers Briggs were the same in all categories except one. In one category, it identified me as an original, imaginative, conceptual person versus a realistic, practical person analyzing facts. And boy, that threw me off. I struggled to digest that. Those results were based on answering about 150 questions in roughly 10 minutes and I wondered if they could really be of any consequence. But, instead of letting it go, I decided to dig a little deeper. The really nice coach from Flynn Heath Holt patiently listened to me, asked me a few questions and said that I look at the big picture and am not afraid to take risks which is why I fall into that Intuitive/Pioneer category. Coincidentally, I received the same set of comments from my senior manager a couple of days before, to which I did not pay a lot of attention. I discussed with another Deloitte mentor in the workshop and she said the same based on what she saw that day. Now, hearing it for the third time meant something to me. It could all just be a happy coincidence or the mentors were being really nice or it could be that I always wanted to be a visionary but thought I was not. I do not know the reason but I decided to believe in it. On my flight back home, I told myself that I am a visionary and I always look at the big picture. I let it sink in.

Just believing in it made a lot of difference in my life and my outlook. I do not know if I have always looked at the big picture till the day before, but from that day on magically, I always did. All it took was to believe that I could. You could too. #BelieveinYOU.